Family Romance, LLC
mubiThe latest feature film from German director, Werner Herzog – since Salt and Fire in 2016 – is definitely an odd departure from what average audience members would call a standard feature film. Family Romance, LLC more so resembles the documentaries that Herzog has taken a greater interest in pursuing for decades now, where he has a very unique and powerful voice in a sea of other great documentarians. Herzog is well known for his doctrine of ‘ecstatic truth’, a type of truth that is much more elusive than simply presenting facts that can only be acquired through fabrication, imagination, and stylization. Family Romance, LLC may be the most extreme example in Herzog’s filmography of a concentrated attempt to achieve this ecstatic truth. The film’s inability to fit comfortably into the labels of ‘documentary’ or ‘feature film’ is what makes it exceptionally special in this modern era of internet personas and fake news.
The film opens as a seemingly regular drama film of a reunion between a father named Yuichi and a daughter named Mahiro. The two spend a day in the park watching a recreation of a samurai battle and reconnecting under a cherry blossom tree, slowly and believably warming up to each other after so much time apart. Almost immediately after that scene, the audience is welcomed with a shocking new fact that is too bizarre to be believed: Yuichi is not Mahiro’s father. Instead, Yuichi runs a business where individuals can rent people to perform roles, like understudies in a stage play of life, and Yuichi has been hired to essentially spy on Mahiro for her mother. Throughout the film, the extent of the services provided by Family Romance is shown and, more importantly, they are presented as normalised business transactions. People can buy fathers, lottery wins, paparazzi or apologies, just like any other service. Herzog’s shaky, amateurish camera treats it like any other business while Yuichi’s day-to-day jobs are explored.
The narrative treats Family Romance with contempt. Yuichi begins to have second thoughts about his position as his relationship with Mahiro becomes more complicated, but Herzog still asks if the issue of purchasing people to play characters in someone’s life is as black or white as it seems. Herzog does not portray the rental family business as inherently Eastern, or even all that recent. Yuichi lives in a world where hotels can be staffed entirely with robots and people rely on the performances of religious oracles to give them advice. Individualism is a commodity in the world Herzog explores and the only way it can be deemed valuable is by how much other individuals value it. Mahiro, an Instagram user, is willing to lie to people, including the man she believes to be her father, in order to make herself look more impressive. Herzog suggests that individuals have a tendency to play roles and take on personas naturally with no need for a check like Yuichi gets. Herzog is suggesting that this doctrine of ‘ecstatic truth’ can come on an individual level, and that is how we know a person is based on their performance, their fabrications and their stylizations.
It is very hard to see how another film, particularly in the next decade, will be as experimental as Family Romance, LLC with regards to the blurring between reality and fiction. It is a film that feels like a culmination, or at least a very big leap, in the doctrines of cinematic presentation of ‘ecstatic truth’ that Herzog has argued for his entire career. The intimate documentary-like camerawork, the very natural performances from actors apparently playing themselves, and individual-level storytelling all contribute to why Family Romance, LLC can feel so quaint yet say such grand things about changing social mores. Family Romance, LLC makes a striking and compelling argument: not only is Yuichi’s world the new normal, but it perhaps always has been the norm. Only in a time period where authenticity and factuality have been questioned does it seem so cold and distant yet familiar and true for human nature to play such a role.
